


Nice

by Evenlodes_Friend



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: Falling In Love, Getting Together, M/M, Movie: Skyfall (2012), Not Bond 25 compliant, Post-SPECTRE, Romance, Two Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-02 02:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19190500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evenlodes_Friend/pseuds/Evenlodes_Friend
Summary: Yesterday, Madeleine left.





	Nice

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before details of the new Bond movie were announced. A quick bit of fluff.
> 
> Incidentally, the story is named after the city, not the biscuit. Just in case you were wondering.

            The house sits on the hill, set back and secluded, with a fine view of the city below.  There is a wide terrace, and a sloping lawn that segues into shrubs and trees.  Several palms with sharp blades of leaves snap in the wind, a chilly reminiscence of the last of the bitter weather.  It is one of those clean, bright mornings of early Spring, cleansed by the frosts of winter, sharp and cool as a flick knife.

            James Bond brings his coffee out onto the terrace and sits at the table.  Below him, the city gleams in the morning sun.  He wears a thick sweater as protection against the wind, and sunglasses against the glare.  In the distance, the sea shimmers blue-grey.  The air is sharp, with a hint of thyme to it.

            He sits for a while before he reaches out for his cup, sipping slowly, meditatively.  It’s a new world and he has no idea how he fits into it. 

            Yesterday, Madeleine left. 

            It was a mutual decision.  She packed her bags slowly, methodically, and the taxi came at 10am to take her to the airport.  By now she will be back at her job at the clinic.  It is something of a risk, returning to her old practice.  There will be plenty of people left out in the cold by Blofeld’s arrest, people who could find her there if they wanted.  People who have very pointed ways of showing displeasure at the inconvenience she has caused them.  Bond liked that she seemed to have no concern about them at all.  Courage, she said in French when he complemented her on her attitude.  She is sick of running.  In the end, she realised that with James, she would always be running.

            So now he is alone, here, looking down on Nice, with a coffee in his hand and the rest of his life to fill.  He wishes he still smoked.  At least that would give him something to do with his hands while he waits for Death to visit him.  Sooner or later, it surely will.  They already have a nodding acquaintance.

            Down there in the city, there are beautiful women to be seduced, bars to be drunk dry, restaurants to be sampled, casinos to be diced with.  No doubt there are also plenty of shady characters with whom he could conduct a battle of wits, or fists, if he so chose.  But there is no challenge in that.  No challenge in any of it.  He knows he has a very simple choice in front of him, as simple as the white porcelain coffee cup, the smooth handle of which he fingers.  Go back or die.

            Life becomes very simple when he is alone.

            He looks at the green slope of the grass, feeling empty.  He realises that it is rare for him to feel so utterly alone.  Weirdly, though a 00 agent is a lone operator, he is never truly on his own.  There is a vast team behind him, the might of MI6 backing him up, even if they can never publicly acknowledge him as one of their own. 

            The lawn undulates over the uneven hillside, patches of moss interspersed with the grass, differing shades of green, added to by the rushing little clouds that carry shadows across the sun, chasing one another on the breeze.

            Green, he thinks.  How many shades of green are there in this world?  And have I seen all of them in my time?

            And then one particular shade of green asserts itself in his memory, rising up in front of his shaded eyes.  It feels like a lifetime ago now, a different century.  And yet the warm feeling of the moment unfurls around him, filling his nostrils with the scent of gun oil, solder and damp brick.

            Green eyes.

            He walked into the workshop, and picked up the gun on the table from its cradle, always curious to see the new project.  A fully automatic snipers’ rifle, the latest killing machine.  He remembers the weight of it in his hands, the satisfying way it settled against his shoulder as he raised it to look down the sights.

            And then Q appeared.

            Q, in that truly hideous brown suit, his hair even more shaggy and unruly than usual.  Q standing right in front of him, the muzzle of the rifle almost against his chest, brushing his lapel.  He fixed Bond’s gaze with his own green eyes, and that was it.

            The truth, (and now, with the glorious 20/20 vision of hindsight, Bond can see it) is that he was lost from that moment.

            Q never let Bond’s gaze drop.  He held the look, held Bond’s eyes as he gently lifted the gun from his hands with all the tenderness of a lover.

            ‘Shall we begin?’ was what he said. 

            And a chasm had opened up inside Bond’s chest, a chasm whose edge he has been skirting ever since.

            The coffee has grown cold.  The cup feels icy in his hand.  He puts it down and looks at the pads of his fingers, presses them to his thumbs, feels the smooth and the rough.  He wonders what Q’s skin would feel like to touch.  He wonders what it would feel like to have Q touch him.  He wonders how many times he has wondered exactly that.

            Green eyes, he realises, as Vesper’s cross his mind.  I’m a sucker for green eyes.

 

 

 

            Q’s earl grey tea has gone cold.  That’s hardly a surprise.  He has been hard at this decryption for the last four hours.  It has defied his best minions, and he’ll be buggered if its going to defy him.  He’s invented pretty much every cyber encryption technique in use today, after all, and he won’t have some pubescent hacker sitting in a feet-smelly fug in a bedroom in Clapham out-doing him.  Standards have to be maintained.

            And then the door opens.

            ‘I _said_ I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ Q snaps without looking up.

            But then there are footsteps on the polished concrete floor, a familiar pattern of footfall that he recognises, oh, he recognises it so well, and what the hell is _he_ doing here?  And what’s more, how the hell did he wangle his way in here?  Because he’s not on the payroll anymore, the bastard, so he shouldn’t have even been able to get past the front door.

            But then when did a front door ever present a problem to James Bond?

            The familiar scent of Bond’s aftershave tickles Q’s nose, and he can’t help feeling the shiver of anticipation in the base of his belly, in spite of himself.

            ‘I don’t have any more DB5s available, Bond, so if you’ve wrapped the last one around a French lamp post, I can’t help you,’ Q says.  ‘And the DB10 is out on a mission with 009, so you’ve had that.’

            When he looks up, Bond is there, right next to him.  Q has to admit he looks well.  Bronzed and rested.  His shoulders are slack.  He carries himself with the ease of a man no longer weighed down with purpose.

            And his eyes, oh his eyes, those pale blue eyes, the colour of an arctic glacier, fringed with soft lashes, eyes that you could tumble into and go under, and never come up again.  Eyes that are full of intent, now, he notices.  Eyes full of meaning.

            Q has always been sceptical about that.  When novelists describe say their characters feelings of desire or rage are clearly depicted in their eyes, Q is always irritated.  Being around spies for a living inoculates you against that sort of wishful thinking.  After all, a spy has to counterfeit all kinds of emotions for the sake of his cover, and Q knows every agent who walks through his door can look just as soulful or jealous or hurt with a contraction of his iris as any fictional creature, and never mean one iota of it.  He simply doesn’t believe he has ever seen anyone’s emotions writ large in their eyes.

            At least, not until now.

            Instinct tells him this is not Bond’s capacity for acting.  As soon as he sees that look, he knows it is real.  For Bond is looking down at him with a softness, a gentleness, that he has never imagined possible in such weathered, brutal features.

            He finds himself rising from his seat, the decryption problem forgotten.  The sandalwood scented warmth of Bond’s body wraps him.  The older man is wearing a black wool pea coat and a thick scarf twisted around his neck, both of which seem familiar.  A faint image dances in Q’s mind.  Bond arriving after the Mexico debacle.  Oh yes, the smart blood programme.  The memory sharpens into the moment when Q touched the naked skin of Bond’s inner forearm, vulnerable and smooth.  There was something incredibly intimate about that, even though he was fitting the metal frame for the injection on the arm of the chair.  He finds himself filling up with the recollection of that secret eroticism, and his breath catches in his throat.

            Now Bond has taken his gaze and imprisoned it, he raises his hand and touches Q’s cheek, so lightly that it barely registers, yet sufficiently that a faint tingle of electricity passes between them.  Q feels Bond’s breath on his cheek, warm and coffee-flavoured.  He finds that he feels rather drunk.  He finds that he is falling in towards Bond’s body like a redundant satellite pulled by inexorable gravity towards earth.

            I don’t care if I burn up, he decides.  I don’t care if I go out in a flare of flame.  It’ll be worth it.

            He lets out a sigh that he is incapable of holding in, lets his body go, stops fighting it, stops fighting all of it, because he has known for a long time what his orbit was, that it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened, and the orbit decayed.  He finds that his head rests perfectly on Bond’s shoulder, the curve of his forehead dovetailing neatly into the replying sweep of Bond’s neck.  Heavy, muscular arms slide around him, settling into a cradle.

            Where else, if not here, he thinks.

 


End file.
